All posts tagged Urban Studies

A sandwich can go by many names depending on where it is being served. A New Yorker’s hero become a grinder if it’s consumed in New England, a hoagie into New Jersey, a zep in southeastern Pennsylvania and a spucky in Boston.

The dictionary’s completion comes at a time when television and the Internet have led to concerns over the disappearance of region-specific lingo. But in certain areas of the country — including Greater New York — local argot still seems to thrive. Read More »

This map represents the total annual energy use by property throughout New York City’s five boroughs with red indicating the highest consumption of energy and orange and yellow for lighter use. Search the map here.

New York City’s appetite for energy is immense, making it a revealing case study for how people use — and waste — energy.

“Midtown Manhattan has more energy use than the whole country of Kenya, and New York state uses more energy than all of sub-Saharan Africa,” said Vijay Modi, a professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University . “There is just this intense use of energy in cities like New York.”

A new project by Modi and graduate student Bianca Howard aims to put the city’s energy consumption on the map. The results of their work are displayed on an interactive map estimating the total annual energy consumption for nearly every building across the five boroughs.

Their research allows New Yorkers to get a rough idea of how much energy is used inside their homes, offices and businesses — and it offers a peek into the building next door, down the street and across the city. The goal of the project is to take some of the mystery out of energy usage. Read More »

Racial segregation declined in the vast majority of U.S. metropolitan areas over the past decade — and the New York City is no exception. But the trend toward integration has been far more modest here than it has in other large cities, according to a new study released Tuesday.

The report is based on an analysis of neighborhood-level data from the 2010 U.S. Census by economists Edward Glaeser of Harvard University and Jacob Vigdor of Duke University. “Segregation is as low as we have ever seen it,” Vigdor tells WSJ’s Miriam Jordan, who reported on their findings.

Among the eye-popping takeaways are the borderline extinction of the all-white neighborhood in American cities and the dramatic shrinking of black ghettos, which now account for only 20% of the African-American population compared to nearly half in 1960. Some places remain heavily segregated, but those neighborhoods are generally home to smaller populations today.

Greater New York followed the pattern of other large cities, with segregation declining between 2000 and 2010 as measured by the “dissimilarity index,” the most common measure. The same held true for 522 out of 658 housing markets across the nation, according to the report. Read More »

Traffic on the George Washington Bridge in August. In a new survey, New Yorkers report some of the best commuting conditions in big cities around the world.

Next time you find yourself stationary during the evening commute, try and look at the big picture: When compared to 20 other big metropolitan areas around the world, New Yorkers have some of the most pain-free commutes.

A new report on so-called “commuter pain” released Thursday by IBM found that workers in Greater New York enjoy the sixth least-painful commute among the cities included in the study. (See this post at WSJ’s Driver’s Seat blog for more.) Among its North American peers, only Toronto, Chicago and Montreal — home of the world’s best rides to the office — topped New York’s overall score.

60% of commuters living in and around the Big Apple spend less than 30 minutes in transit, beating the global average for that metric. And the metro area leads the world in micro-commutes: 23% of New Yorkers surveyed reported a commute of less than 15 minutes.

Beneath the not-t00-miserable headline rankings, the IBM study — based on surveys with more than 8,000 people — finds plenty of commuter ire in New York. Read More »

The BMW Guggenheim Lab, a traveling installation now in the East Village, has launched an online game that tests users on 10 imaginary dilemmas about education, housing and sustainability. Among the yes-or-no questions:

A huge piece of graffiti is attracting tourists. Will you enforce existing city policy and have the graffiti removed?

Many apartments are empty, but there is a shortage of affordable housing. Will you allow the city to forcibly purchase apartments and make them affordable?

Will you authorize a law that forbids the purchase of school textbooks made of less than 50% recycled materials, even though it will raise their cost?

After every question, you’re told how many people voted yes or no. A final result pairs you with the city that fits you best and ranks your stated priorities as revealed by the quiz.

I’ve been deported to Toronto. My top priority is health and lowest is livability, according to the quiz. Read More »

How does New York City compare with the burgeoning supercities of the developing world?

Two interesting data visualizations from the new book “Living in the Endless City,” which examines the future of urban life, help put the largest U.S. city in perspective against its global counterparts. By 2050, the project notes, 75% of the world’s population is projected to live in cities, up from 53% today. Read More »

Yet blowing off tickets hasn’t been the exclusive privilege of those with personal connections to helpful police officers. A new academic paper looks back at the era when foreign diplomats in New York City were free to flout parking rules without paying fines, and finds that diplomats from countries with low average IQ scores were likely to amass more unpaid parking tickets. Read More »

NYU says the planned building, at center of rendering above, would relate to current towers.

Is Greenwich Village big enough for both a rapidly expanding New York University and the tens of thousands of non-students who call the iconic neighborhood home?

In a provocative feature story released Monday, New York magazine looks at the entrenched battle lines over the university’s ambitions to add some six million square feet of classroom, dormitory, office and hotel space by 2031. Half of the proposed expansion — or, as the magazine puts it, the equivalent of three Javits Centers — is slated to land within Greenwich Village.

The fact that NYU’s growth has irritated its neighbors is hardly news. But the magazine does an admirable job of putting the seemingly endless antagonism between the school and its neighbors into perspective. Led by John Sexton, NYU’s dynamic president, the university and its allies frame their interests as aligned with the economic best interests of New York City — and it’s not a difficult case to make. But it’s also not hard to imagine why quotes like this might irritate Village denizens who feel they’ve been overrun by binge-drinking hordes:

“Having 40,000 students is like having year-round tourists,” says Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at NYU. “They spend their parents’ money and don’t consume too much of public service and add to the nightlife.”

The magazine piece picks at some of the rawest wounds in the relationship between NYU and its neighbors over the school’s push to go vertical in a famously low-slung district. Read More »

The study used a three-kilometer taxi trip (about 2 miles) as the benchmark, and offered a price range for both low- and high-traffic periods. New York City, with a range between $7 and $12, is the 26th most expensive city for taxi fares out of 72 included in the study.

In Zurich, the most expensive city overall, going that same three kilometers by cab can cost as much as $24.24. (All prices have been converted into U.S. dollars.) Read More »

Do-it-yourself food cultivation has found a home in New York City, with backyard chicken coops, honeybee apiaries and rooftop gardens sprouting like spring lettuce inside America’s largest metropolis. But the urban farming trend has its limits. In Manhattan, at least, the locavore line appears to be drawn at the cow.

There is just one cow who calls the island home, according to local animal experts. His name is Othello and he lives happily outside the food chain at the Central Park Zoo.

The 14-year-old Dexter cow is an ambassador for his entire species in a borough crowded with people — an animal that, while commonplace in much of the U.S., becomes somewhat exotic in Manhattan, earning a spot at the zoo alongside two alpacas and a polar bear.